Piracy and Newspapers
Monday, November 17th, 2008 by Patrick Ross
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We’ve all heard that print newspapers are dead, that people like me who like to spread a newspaper across a breakfast table are dinosaurs. News at your fingertips on the web is where it’s at, we hear, and circulation and web traffic data would seem to support that. To respond, newspapers have proven aggressive in using their web sites to update stories in real time and supplement those stories with graphics, links to more information, video, databases, photos, and numerous other resources that one can’t find in the print version. Revenues from online advertising is anemic compared to print, but newspapers are moving online anyway to meet consumer demand. But what if consumers are indeed consuming that output of many reporters and editors, but away from the actual newspaper site such that the producer of that creative work sees no compensation for the work?
That is happening with dramatic frequency every day, it seems, reminding us again that piracy is not limited to music and motion pictures. An Associated Press story cited a study by Attributor (disclaimer — a Copyright Alliance member) from late last week finding that readership of newspaper stories online is nearly one-and-a-half times as likely to occur off of a newspaper’s site than on it. The study is available free on the Attributor web site.
That’s a lot of lost revenue. Every US newspaper chain has seen their market caps dry up such that GM’s problems seem a walk in the park. According to Digital Deliverance, NYT is down 75% in six years. McClatchey, down 95% over three years. Media General, down 83% over four years. Gannett, down 65% in four years. Those four companies combined account for about 160 daily newspapers. Even though every reader of news stories online knows the biggest asset of any newspaper is the intellectual output it produces — the gathering and combining of facts in a readable and comprehensive way — the market sees its biggest asset as the building a newspaper houses, something that will never produce a single news story.
The US Congress and Henry Paulson aren’t going to bail out this industry that is so critical to a functioning democracy. And readers online aren’t going to either if they are unwittingly undermining the producers of these works by reading them in ways that the producers can’t monetize them. (Note I’m giving many online readers the benefit of the doubt, that unlike most P2P and BitTorrent users today downloading music and movies, many reading news stories on various sites are not aware that they are robbing the author and his or her publisher much-needed revenue. The guilty parties here are the ones that relocate the works to monetize them themselves or use the works to increase traffic.)
Helping restore the revenue stream is where Attributor can play a role. The company already tracks the appearance of news stories produced by AP, Reuters and others across billions of web pages, giving news producers real-time information as to the dissemination — authorized or not — of their works across the web.
Attributor’s Rich Pearson said in the news account that their study showed news producers were losing $150,000 to as much as $1 million annually in lost ad revenues as a result of these unauthorized story views. (Those totals, while dismaying, also convey how poorly online ad revenues compare to print ones, at least for now as print remains popular with a dwindling segment of the population.) It should also be noted that Attributor was not looking to scoop up what would be considered fair use quotes in blogs and other sites. They only counted works that included at least 50 percent of the original work and contained more than 125 words.
Fair use is important, it explicitly permits commentary, and that has allowed our society to have more free discourse than any other on Earth. But there is a difference between taking an excerpt from a story to make a point, and reprinting that story without permission. Reprinting on a web page is no different than reprinting in a separate newspaper, which we’ve also seen. (The latest example of that involved plagiarized obituaries.)
Readers need to be more careful about the sources producing the news they’re reading, and news producers need to be more vigilant about tracking their works and protecting their copyrights. The cut-and-paste culture is common online, and it’s not one newspapers are used to. Jayson Blair doesn’t come along every day, but online thievery occurs every minute. For the sake of all of us who value well-sourced, well-reported, well-written and well-edited news stories, let’s hope that news producers can properly be paid for their work.
ADDENDUM: Rich has pointed out to me that in fact the study went beyond newspapers (a pet subject of mine) and examined feeds from more than 100 publisher sites across a variety of content categories. Again, worth examining their study, available at attributor.com/.
